Posts Tagged ‘rolls’

I love the tangzhong method of bread baking, it gives such great results every time – pillowy soft, slightly sweet, incredibly versatile bread. If you haven’t heard of tangzhong before then it is quite simple; it just involves making a cooked paste of flour and water which is added to the bread dough; the dough is quite sticky, so is best made in a stand mixer, but it stays soft for days and is SO good! (more…)

After making my own mincemeat recently I found myself with rather a lot of it! There are only so many mince pies a girl can eat (though that number may be quite high), so I tried to think of some other ways to use some of it up. The best way I came up with was these mincemeat and marzipan cinnamon buns, which also helpfully used up the marzipan leftover from covering my Christmas cake. (more…)

One of the biggest powerhouses in any baker’s arsenal is the stand mixer, it renders a great many tasks considerably easier and enables you to do other things whilst at the same time mixing cake batter, making meringue or kneading bread dough. Unfortunately they are generally prohibitively expensive, which is why when my (second-hand and gifted) KitchenAid mixer exploded I was unable to afford to replace it and have been without one for a long time. I still have it, sat in a cupboard awaiting the time when I get round to finding a replacement circuit board for it, but I keep forgetting to do so. (more…)

We attended our first barbecue of the year at the weekend. The weather was glorious, the company couldn’t have been better and the food was plentiful (though not as plentiful as the alcohol…); all in all it was a lovely day and one that I hope to repeat many times over the summer. But I have never actually hosted my own barbecue; we spent many years living in a flat, making barbecues impossible, and although we now have a house, the garden is very narrow, the patio tiny and the whole garden is in quite a state; it needs some serious work doing to it before we can even fit a barbecue out there, let alone more than two people. We intend to sort it out this summer, and when (if) we do, I’ll finally get round to hosting one and will probably vastly over-cater because I can’t have people round without providing waay too much food – can’t risk anyone going hungry! (more…)

The July Daring Bakers’ Challenge was brought to us by Manal from Manal’s Bites. She introduced us to an authentic Palestinian dish from Jaffa that is served as a main meal along with a bowl of soup or a salad. The “Yafawi Sfeeha” or also known as “Milwayeh” which means twisted, is crispy yet tender and full of flavor.

I have had a truly terrible week, and am in somewhat of a foul mood at the moment, so I apologise if I don’t really feel like talking about food today and this post gets a bit ranty… Skip straight to the recipe if you like! We were supposed to be going on holiday today to Wacken festival in Germany, everything was booked and paid for (and non-refundable…); but we are unable to go because the British passport office are the biggest bunch of unhelpful incompetents I have ever encountered. (more…)

I had a bit of leftover cream sitting in the fridge about to pass it’s use by date and couldn’t for the life of me think what to do with it; I had been planning on baking some pain au lait and then I had a thought – why not use cream in place of the milk? I wasn’t entirely sure how well it would work, whether the cream would make the bread too heavy, but I gave it a go regardless and was incredibly pleased by the result. (more…)

The February Daring Bakers’ challenge is hosted by Julie of One-Wall Kitchen. She challenged us to an easy, simple filled bun using no-knead dough.

This months Daring Bakers challenge was to make Siopao – Asian filled buns. We could fill them with any sweet or savoury filling we wanted, but the filling recipe given with the challenge was for pork. Being vegetarian, I was initially planning on making a veggie filling for mine, but after hearing that the challenge was for pork buns, my not-remotely-vegetarian fiance gave me puppy-dog eyes and pleaded with me to make pork ones for him (I may be exaggerating slightly about the pleading…). I relented as the poor man is forced to eat a vegetarian diet roughly 90% of the time as I do most of the cooking (he doesn’t complain). I don’t mind cooking a bit of meat for him every now and again and will occasionally make a batch of meat pies to store in the freezer for when he gets a craving. I figured I could do the same with the buns (I doubt he’d be able to eat twelve of them within a couple of days!). (more…)